HSBC’s Technology Glitch Halts 275,000 Payments

Business customers of Europe’s largest bank were in uproar late last week when a technology issue disrupted thousands of payment transactions.

The glitch impacted payments made from companies processed through Britain’s Bacs system, which handles the electronic transactions, Reuters reported.

“Approximately 275,000 payments have been affected, including payments to customers of other banks,” HSBC told Reuters.

While the bank confirmed customers could expect the transactions to be processed over the course of last Friday afternoon and early Saturday evening, many customers who expected to receive their monthly wages were left with nothing to do but wait for the money to become available.

But many also took to social media to vent their frustrations about their unpaid salaries as a result of the IT crash.

Nice of HSBC to give thousands of people with regularly paid jobs the ‘you’ll get it when you get it’ Freelance Experience.

— Scriblit (@Scriblit) August 28, 2015

@HSBC_UK need food shopping. Need diesel in my car. Need to pay bills. Come on.

— Cam (@bikercam) August 28, 2015

“This appears to be yet another serious IT failure by one of the major clearing banks,” lawmaker Andrew Tyrie, who chairs parliament’s Treasury Committee, told Reuters on Friday.

Earlier this year, the Royal Bank of Scotland confirmed 600,000 credit and debit transactions that were held up due to a system glitch.

The bank reported that hundreds of thousands of transfers went missing due to a computer system failure, which closely resembled the cause of its other major IT meltdown back in 2012. Just last year, the bank was fined $87 million for the earlier fiasco, which locked millions of customers out of accounts and knocked out payments processing systems.

Shortly after being slapped with that fine, the bank experienced yet another glitch leaving many customers’ credit and debit cards totally disabled.

“It is increasingly clear that most, if not all, of these banks’ IT payments systems need a good deal of investment, and there is a lot to put right,” Tyrie added.

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